In 1995, the Hubble Space telescope was pointed “at nothing” for over 100h. Although this was seen as a waste of time initially, it created one of the most famous images – the Hubble Deep Field. Here a
link to an article about the story.
I do not have access to Hubble, and will not spend 100 hours imaging - the closest I can go to create my own personal “Deep Field” is to go as deep as possible into a tiny expanse in the constellation Coma Berenices. There you can find an area that is literally littered with galaxies: The Coma Cluster of Galaxies, a group of more than 1,000 galaxies located at an average distance of about 320 million light years.
Galaxies in this super cluster contain mostly elliptical, more or less featureless galaxies. Fascinating for me is not the beauty of the galaxies but the sheer number of them in an image taken with a modest 8” amateur telescope on a bortle 6-7 sky … Please take time to zoom into full resolution. The annotated version B puts labels to roughly 300 galaxies, some are visible and not annotated. The weaker ones should be around 18-19 mag.
15 hours of luminance and 4 hours of RGB went into this image.
300 x 180s L
120 x 120s RGB
CS,
Volker
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